"Nat Friedman has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the Linux desktop for a few year now. First with his own company Ximian, founded together with Mono chief architect Miguel de Icaza, after its acquisition now inside Novell. A few months ago he has been named 'Technologist of the Year' by the VarBusiness magazine for his work around the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Since then he has been promoted to Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source, besides the desktop he is also overseeing Novells server business now. During Novells Brainshare Andreas Proschofsky had the possibility to sit down with Friedman and talk about the Linux desktop, the consequences of the Microsoft agreement and the mistakes of the Hula project."

Unfortunately for Novell, people like Allison (the SAMBA developer) cannot be discounted of as just "professional commentators". Novell has created a breach in the community and worked as a MS FUD tool, I read many comments not only from users, promptly ditching SUSE for other distros, but from developers as well, upset that someone could take advantage of their work allowing only a selected few to use it.

GPL v. 3 looms over, Novell's wishful thinking under that regard has no significance, the first they start to work to correct the situation the better for all of us.